


Nine

by ladyknightley



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Babies, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 16:33:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14856278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyknightley/pseuds/ladyknightley
Summary: Nine stories about nine pregnancies; one for each month. (i) Ginny and Harry, the first month, and the first time.





	Nine

Ginny would never have believed it—any of it—if she’d read it in a book. It’s too fantastical for even for fiction. The most ridiculous, outlandish, daft story ever.

No one goes from vaguely wanting children, maybe, perhaps, someday, in the very distant future, to being ready to have a family  _now_. That doesn’t happen. And if, hypothetically, a person did—well, it wouldn’t happen straight away. First-month-of-trying straight away. That’s just silly. Wishful thinking.  _No one_  is that lucky.

Except…it  _did_  happen. She  _is_  that lucky. And she can hardly believe it herself. She sits on the edge of the bathtub, clutching the test like it might up and run away if she doesn’t hold on tight, and she starts, very quietly, to laugh.

She and Harry had always discussed children in the abstract: they both knew they wanted them, but not yet. Or at least— _she’d_  always said not yet. Harry had said he’d be happy to have them as soon as she was ready, but it was her body, so she got to call the shots. If that was next week, fine. If that was when she was in her forties, also fine. She’d always thought that was very reasonable, and filed the subject under ‘sorted’ in her mind. Children would remain an abstract concept, and she and Harry would remain very much in the real world, happy as they were.

But then at Christmas, she’d corralled Teddy into having his picture taken with Harry in front of the tree. “Say cheese!” she’d said, and Teddy had cried out for her to wait. He’d screwed up his face and, in a moment, was wearing a mop of jet black, messy hair.

“Now we match!” he’d crowed to Harry, who had laughed and ruffled his locks, and the sight of it all had taken her breath away.  _That is what our children will look like_ she’d thought. And then, in the next moment,  _and I want to see them. Now._ It had taken a worrying amount of self-control, given that Teddy was standing right there, not to just rip his clothes off there and then.

They’d discussed it, of course.

Or rather, Andromeda had arrived to take Teddy home, and the very second they’d both vanished from the floo, Ginny had grabbed him, pushed him down onto the sofa and sat across his lap, and said “I’m ready to have a baby  _now_.”

He’d paused for only the slightest of seconds. “Okay,” he’d said, and she’d kissed him. He’d pulled away. “Do you not need to, you know, pack a hospital bag or something?” And she’d laughed, and said not to be so silly, and he said he wasn’t being silly, he was being  _practical_ , like Aurors were trained to be, and normally she liked that very much, and she’d said no, there were other things she liked very much more than his being a practical person. And he’d asked what those were, so she’d told him, and then things had gone somewhat downhill. (Well, uphill).

But over the next week, with them both at home and off work for the holidays, they had discussed it, seriously. They had talked and discussed, and both agreed that, practically, although they both wanted a baby very much, it was a good idea to wait until she’d finished her latest tour with the England team. Which they duly did.

Four weeks ago, she’d arrived home.

And now, here she is, in the bathroom early on Sunday morning, clutching the test. She’d picked it up a few days ago, and it’s been hiding, waiting, in her sock draw ever since. But she could’ve kept it there, really.

Because she knew. She  _knew_. She couldn’t explain it, but she’d known since that first week. She had no symptoms, didn’t feel sick. But somehow, something in her had changed, and even though she didn’t know how to describe what it was she was feeling, she knew that she  _knew_. She might never have taken a Divination class in her life before, but when she goes into the bathroom, creeping in quietly so as to not wake Harry, she knows exactly what the test is going to say.

And it does.

Now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she tells herself firmly that this is still very early days. Things can still happen. They—she—should be cautious. But just as she knew what the test was going to say, somehow she knows with equal certainty that  _this is going to be okay_. (She—they—will still the standard twelve weeks before telling anyone. Doing anything else feels less like tempting fate, and more like rolling out the red carpet and welcoming fate inside with a flourish. But she still  _just knows_  that this will be nothing more than a precaution.)

And so, knowing that everything is going to be okay even though she can’t explain how or why, she stands up, looks in the mirror and mentally tells herself to stop laughing and pull herself together, and she creeps back into their bedroom to wake Harry. At least, she plans to.

She hasn’t told him any of this yet. They’d both agreed that it would probably take a while to happen. A few months, at least. And although she’s known for a few weeks now, she hasn’t said anything to him about the feelings she was having. She hadn’t wanted to raise his expectations, just in case. There’s also a part of her that couldn’t say anything because she knows how ridiculous she would sound if she’d said ‘I just know’ out loud. It’s silly enough in her head. She didn’t even tell him she was buying the test.

Except, when she exits the bathroom, test hidden behind her back, he’s already leaving their bedroom, and there’s a look on his face that she recognises, but can’t place.

He crosses the hallway to her in two bounds. “Is it…”

She holds up the test, forgetting that he won’t be able to read it without his glasses on. He doesn’t seem to need them, though. “It is,” she nods.

“Are you…”

“I am.”

“Okay.” He says. “Okay.  _Okay_.”

He steps towards her as she steps towards him, but they both stop short of one another, not yet touching yet, but just  _looking_ at each other.

“I know,” she says. “I know,  _I know_.” She hops up and down on the spot and lets out a slightly hysterical giggle. Harry runs his hands through his hair and mirrors her with a disbelieving laugh, and she holds up the test. He’s close enough to read it now, but she tells him anyway. “Positive!” she says. “It’s…I’m positive.”

She doesn’t know how much longer she can contain herself. They’re both breathing hard, and in tandem.

He nods. “You’re positive,” he says. And then: “You’re pregnant.”

She takes a deep breath, and says, for the first time, “I’m pregnant.”

Later, they will sit down properly and soberly talk things through. They’ll make practical arrangements: when they’re going to tell people. How they will make their careers work around it. They’ll talk appointments, godparents (as if that’s even a choice), names and nurseries. They will act like the grown-up adults they are, making the most important decision of their lives.

But right now, she just jumps into him, wrapping her legs around his waist, her looping her arms behind his neck, and shrieks with glee and happiness, and he turns and spins them, spins them, spins them, both laughing and crying and laughing again.

And in the second before she closes her eyes and launches herself at him, she realises what the expression on his face had been, and why he was already out of their bedroom even when she had been so careful not to wake him. Harry, too, had somehow  _just known_.

Which was also totally fantastical. She couldn’t have made it up, wouldn’t have believed it if someone else had told her. It was ridiculous. But it was true.

The truth might be stranger than fiction, she thinks to herself, but sometimes, it’s also  _better_  than fiction. It’s fact.  _They’re_  fact. They’re this lucky, the two of them.

Well.  _Three_.

**Author's Note:**

> Another prompt from a while back. This one was simply to write about Harry and Ginny finding out she was pregnant, so I hope it did what it said on the tin. This is one I want to expand - I plan to write nine ficlets about nine different couples, one for each month of pregnancy. So I aim to get that finished about 2052, at my current rate...


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